This excerpt isn't even the main thrust of the column, but it was chucklesome.
Perhaps you have seen this interview, in which Tucker Carlson makes the case for banning automated trucks in order to save truck drivers’ jobs. Carlson has a point, of course, but he misses the real enemy: Sure, we could save some jobs by preventing technological progress in transportation, and we could create a lot more jobs in transportation by taking the proactive step of banning trucks and making everybody use donkey carts, but the real problem—the real job-killer!— is, obviously, the wheel. Make people transport goods with bindles like medieval serfs and we’ll have more transportation-sector jobs than we know what to do with. Of course, we’ll have a medieval-serf standard of living, too.You should RTWT...
(Some of you are hearing these words in your heads: “Why not use spoons?”)
This is nonsense, and I know Carlson doesn’t actually believe this. If he did, he would quit his job. As in transportation, technology has radically increased the financial returns to a successful career in asinine demagoguery, but it also has put a lot of asinine demagogues out of business. There would be a lot more jobs for asinine demagogues if they had to travel around the country—on horses, of course, if not on foot—giving speeches on soapboxes and stumps the way they did in the early 19th century.
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